Beyond the Page: Histories, Methods, and Futures of the Artists’ Magazine

Artists’ magazines today are more than printed objects—they are dynamic platforms, social networks, exhibition spaces, and sites of artistic production. While much scholarship has focused on the radical print cultures of the 1960s and 70s—when artists’ magazines emerged as alternatives to institutional gatekeeping—today’s publications exist in a radically different media landscape shaped by social media, algorithmic circulation, and fluid editorial models. These hybrid publications operate at the intersection of print and digital, commercial and alternative, physical and virtual, and blur boundaries between media, institutions, and communities. Some explore novel formats, while others seek refuge in more traditional publication forms, even as they forge new economic and editorial structures, and exist within a nexus of other kinds of spaces, activities, and events. This panel explores the evolving nature of artists’ magazines and the methodological challenges they pose. How can we describe and theorize this new mediascape? What tools, models, case studies, and methodologies might past scholarship offer for understanding the contemporary world of art publishing? What new, interdisciplinary approaches, such as media studies, sociology, digital humanities, or network theory are available for navigating today’s blurred media ecosystems? Is the term “artists’ magazine” still useful in this context? We welcome papers that address these questions or others that reflect on the history of artists’ magazines and how they have evolved in today, and that attend to the material, social, and/or technological dimensions of artists’ magazines and their publics.